Authors

Discussion

The proposed paper examines the public reception of Stalin's cult of personality in Soviet Georgia. It seeks to understand how Georgian society perceived and responded to Stalinist narratives during the Stalinist era and became involved in the reproduction of Stalin’s Georgianised cult of personality, co-constructed by the local political elite and intelligentsia. In addition to state archives, the study draws on a wide range of private collections such as diaries, memoirs, oral histories, private correspondence, and amateur photographs. It examines these diverse personal materials as a unified corpus to shed light not only on the everyday discourses about Stalin that were vocal during Soviet times but also on those that were either self-censored or silenced by the regime. 

The paper employs a ‘subjectivity studies’ approach to understand how individuals constructed their subjectivity within a specific historical context. The materials used for this study span from the Stalinist period to the post-Soviet era and reveal both vocal and silenced voices concerning Stalin's image in Stalinist Georgia, along with shifts in the public reception of Stalin's cult in Georgia over time. While Stalin-era documents often avoided direct references to Stalin due to fear of repression, post-Stalin accounts provide more open reflections on his cult, and post-Soviet sources even frame him as a religious icon. Such dynamics in direct references to Stalin highlights the evolving dimensions of Georgian Stalinism.

The analysis identifies three overarching narratives about Stalin: as a great Soviet leader, a revered Georgian figure, and a religious icon. These categories structure the examination of primary sources across three temporal phases: High Stalinism, the post-Stalin Soviet period, and the post-Soviet era. The findings underscore the complexity of public engagement with Stalinist narratives, revealing the interplay between political, national, and religious dimensions of Stalin’s cult and its enduring influence on Georgian collective memory.